Save our schools.

For the past 8 years my son has been attending Norwich Road School in Thetford which we had always found to be excellent. When a vacancy came up on the LGB I was happy to stand and was duly elected as a parent governor.

I was presented with a vote on whether to become an academy in my very first meeting as a parent governor. I abstained, feeling at the time that I lacked enough information to decide either way.

The motion was carried with a couple more abstentions and nobody voting against and from that moment in the spring of 2013 we were effectively an academy

A year and a bit in, our SAT results have failed to improve. There seems to be additional budget, particularly for ICT (the ATT/GAIA link of course) while additional spending on staff is being squeezed.

The Academy experiment does not yet seem to be working for us but we have been told to expect it to take three years (by which time of course everything will have changed again).

I have sent my own son to a local authority school in a neighbouring town and so far have been happy with the decision.

Comments

The Academy Transformation Trust which runs the Norwich Road Academy has been 'halted' by the DfE from taking on more academies. In 2013, ATT awarded the ICT contract for its academies to Gaia Technologies, a firm whose director, Anas Abdulmawla (aka Anas Mawla), was an ATT director until June 2014.